Entering No-Man’s-Land: The Interior of Homines Sacri in David Jones’s In Parenthesis
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This paper examines the infantrymen of David Jones’s In Parenthesis to reveal the ambiguous political status of the infantrymen in the First World War and delineate how their interior cultural memories intersect with their political position. As a devout Anglo-Welsh Catholic in the age of atheology, Jones’s record of the First World War that he “saw, felt, & was part of” as an infantryman is replete with allusions to Welsh myths and Christianity. These Christian allusions and heroic metaphors have often led to oversimplifying In Parenthesis as a work that either heroicizes or victimizes the infantrymen. In Parenthesis does emphasize the destruction of humanity on the one hand, but it also reveals a more dialectic relationship between the infantrymen and the war they are participating in. Using Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer, the first section of the paper will discuss how the political existence of the infantrymen is suspended as they proceed further and further towards no-man’s-land. Entering the ambivalent no-man’s-land where violence is its only language, the soldiers vacillate dangerously between being an instrument of sovereign power and also its victim. The second section will concentrate on how this political position is yet again in tension with their interior as “rememberers” and “makers” of culture. Against their biopolitical status that suspends them from being neither bare life nor part of the sovereign, the soldiers continue their gratuitous acts, singing and calling upon the presence of each other and the cultural memories that are deeply engraved within them. It is this moment of unease and discrepancy that gives rise to an awakening of a modern self. In Parenthesis weaves together the unsung songs of the modern bards against the nihilistic mechanism of the modern era.
Abstract
This paper examines the infantrymen of David Jones’s In Parenthesis to reveal the ambiguous political status of the infantrymen in the First World War and delineate how their interior cultural memories intersect with their political position. As a devout Anglo-Welsh Catholic in the age of atheology, Jones’s record of the First World War that he “saw, felt, & was part of” as an infantryman is replete with allusions to Welsh myths and Christianity. These Christian allusions and heroic metaphors have often led to oversimplifying In Parenthesis as a work that either heroicizes or victimizes the infantrymen. In Parenthesis does emphasize the destruction of humanity on the one hand, but it also reveals a more dialectic relationship between the infantrymen and the war they are participating in. Using Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer, the first section of the paper will discuss how the political existence of the infantrymen is suspended as they proceed further and further towards no-man’s-land. Entering the ambivalent no-man’s-land where violence is its only language, the soldiers vacillate dangerously between being an instrument of sovereign power and also its victim. The second section will concentrate on how this political position is yet again in tension with their interior as “rememberers” and “makers” of culture. Against their biopolitical status that suspends them from being neither bare life nor part of the sovereign, the soldiers continue their gratuitous acts, singing and calling upon the presence of each other and the cultural memories that are deeply engraved within them. It is this moment of unease and discrepancy that gives rise to an awakening of a modern self. In Parenthesis weaves together the unsung songs of the modern bards against the nihilistic mechanism of the modern era.
참고문헌 (14)
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- Sherry, Vincent B. Jr, "David Jones’s In Parenthesis: New Measure", Twentieth Century Literature, 20(4), pp.375~380 (1982)
- Staudt, Kathleen Henderson, "At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics" (1994), U of Michigan P
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